This introductory course surveys the history of Europe from the Renaissance to the present era. The central theme of this course will be the varied attempts of European peoples to invent and transform the parameters of individual and collective identity from the beginning of the modern period to its post-modern aftermath. Using a wide range of sources from learned treatises in political theory, religion and philosophy to documents of peasant revolt, war poetry, novels, and private memoirs, we will examine the major landmarks in the social, political, and intellectual history of Europe: European expansion, the Renaissance and Reformations, the emergence of nation-states, the Enlightenment, the European revolutions, industrialization, socialism, imperialism, the World Wars and the reconfiguration of Europe in the twentieth century.